“The assignation might be a cunning trap, in any case it was a curious one; why, she argued, did not Smethurst elect to see Kershaw at his hotel the following day?  A thousand whys and wherefores made her anxious, but the fat German had been won over by Kershaw’s visions of untold gold, held tantalisingly before his eyes.  He had lent the necessary L2, with which his friend intended to tidy himself up a bit before he went to meet his friend the millionaire.  Half an hour afterwards Kershaw had left his lodgings, and that was the last the unfortunate woman saw of her husband, or Mueller, the German, of his friend.

“Anxiously his wife waited that night, but he did not return; the next day she seems to have spent in making purposeless and futile inquiries about the neighbourhood of Fenchurch Street; and on the 12th she went to Scotland Yard, gave what particulars she knew, and placed in the hands of the police the two letters written by Smethurst.”

CHAPTER II

A MILLIONAIRE IN THE DOCK

The man in the corner had finished his glass of milk.  His watery blue eyes looked across at Miss Polly Burton’s eager little face, from which all traces of severity had now been chased away by an obvious and intense excitement.

“It was only on the 31st,” he resumed after a while, “that a body, decomposed past all recognition, was found by two lightermen in the bottom of a disused barge.  She had been moored at one time at the foot of one of those dark flights of steps which lead down between tall warehouses to the river in the East End of London.  I have a photograph of the place here,” he added, selecting one out of his pocket, and placing it before Polly.

“The actual barge, you see, had already been removed when I took this snapshot, but you will realize what a perfect place this alley is for the purpose of one man cutting another’s throat in comfort, and without fear of detection.  The body, as I said, was decomposed beyond all recognition; it had probably been there eleven days, but sundry articles, such as a silver ring and a tie pin, were recognizable, and were identified by Mrs. Kershaw as belonging to her husband.

“She, of course, was loud in denouncing Smethurst, and the police had no doubt a very strong case against him, for two days after the discovery of the body in the barge, the Siberian millionaire, as he was already popularly called by enterprising interviewers, was arrested in his luxurious suite of rooms at the Hotel Cecil.

“To confess the truth, at this point I was not a little puzzled.  Mrs. Kershaw’s story and Smethurst’s letters had both found their way into the papers, and following my usual method—­mind you, I am only an amateur, I try to reason out a case for the love of the thing—­I sought about for a motive for the crime, which the police declared Smethurst had committed.  To effectually get rid of a dangerous blackmailer was the generally accepted theory.  Well! did it ever strike you how paltry that motive really was?”